I was asked during a job interview about a timeline for learning SQL. I have worked with a data warehouse in SAS for two years with another company in the same industry. What are your thoughts on this?

standard answer...it depends: experience is based on challenges and problems you learn to overcome, right? it depends ont he work environment.

if you write reports, you could expect your knowledge of the database and TSQL skills to improve, but not administrative skills like clustering, administration etc.on the opposite end, if all you do is run backups and make sure they ran, how much do your development and tsql skills improve? you can look back and say "for me, it took x months or whatever, and it might be too long or too short for me, based on my subjective experience in my own environment.

Lowell--There is no spoon, and there's no default ORDER BY in sql server either.Actually, Common Sense is so rare, it should be considered a Superpower. --my son

In my case I started to really learn sql on my current job, even the previous job I had was sql development for a year, this job exposed me to scripting, sp's, sql jobs and millions of lines of code. I also had the opportunity to learn from talented SQL developers. I really started to dive in deep 2 years in...The two most funnest aspects that I enjoy now are Nested sub-queries and quick de-duping using partition over.

It definitely depends. Do you have previous experience doing other databases. For me the design skills I picked up designing MS Access applications and the T-SQL skills I learned as a VB programmer helped a great deal. The main deficiency I had by then was in the straight administration, and a week long class helped with that.

If I'd been starting from scratch, I can't even say if I would have known I would have enjoyed it.